Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  The first part of “The Emotional Secrets of Melinda” consists of what is elementary and obvious about Melinda, an interior decorator who happens to be a compulsive shopper. The second part tells us more about Melinda and the nature of her sabotage, while the third part exposes the core issues, or the profound truths at the heart of Melinda’s self-sabotage. The fourth and last section of Melinda’s story deals with recovery from self-sabotage and her attainment of inner peace.

  Part One. Melinda is excellent at her work and makes a decent income from it. However, her personal life is completely unsatisfactory. She is depressed and irritable, and often feels she isn’t adequate or good enough as a person. She subjects herself to a constant barrage of self-criticism, feels drained and exhausted at work, and resents having to focus on her husband’s needs.

  Larry, her husband, is a businessman who puts his work first. He is often critical of Melinda, appears to take her for granted, and is reluctant to spend money on her although he is generous with his relatives and full of compliments for them.

  Melinda often broods about how she feels treated. She suffers with feelings that, “Larry doesn’t give to me, pay attention to me, or show that he cares. In fact, no one listens to me. My feelings are ignored or dismissed as insignificant. I don’t get a loving, caring response from Larry or from others.”

  Part Two. On weekends, Melinda spends much of her leisure time shopping. She buys on impulse and often doesn’t wear what she buys. Her closets are stuffed with clothing. She has more than fifty pairs of shoes and insists on buying from the most expensive shops. “Whenever I feel depressed, I go shopping,” Melinda explains. “I feel better for a while after I’ve purchased a couple of new outfits.” She becomes angry and defensive when her husband brings up the problem of her spending and attempts to curtail it. The self-sabotage is evident: she is $25,000 in debt on her credit cards and her spending problem is threatening the marriage as well as the couple’s financial situation. Nonetheless, Melinda feels unable to alter her behavior.

  Part Three. Now we come to the underlying problem. Melinda is convinced Larry doesn’t care about her or her personal interests. She complains, “My whole life revolves around him—his decisions, his wants, and his needs. I’m just his little servant girl.” Melinda feels she doesn’t get her needs met by a husband who, she claims, is self-absorbed and unsupportive. However, despite her conscious wish to be appreciated and loved, she remains entangled in feeling unappreciated.

  That feeling was familiar: Melinda’s brooding silent father never gave her much emotional support or validation. Unconsciously, she is acting out with Larry her attachment to dealing with someone who (like her father) is self-absorbed and indifferent to her feelings and even her existence. In other words, based on her childhood experience, she expects this indifferent response from Larry, and she is emotionally invested in continuing to experience it. She transfers on to Larry the experience she had with her father of having no value and being unimportant. Her compulsive shopping is a symptom of this conflict, as well as a defense against it.

  Through the shopping, she attempts to deny or cover up her emotional indulgence in feeling unappreciated by giving to herself in an extravagant, indulgent manner. This defense, played out unconsciously, goes like this: “It’s not true that I seek to feel unappreciated. Look at the nice things I buy for myself. It’s not true that I’m attached to feeling unworthy. Can’t you see how much I hate that feeling! And look, Larry really is stingy with his affection and money. I’m entitled to be very upset with him. Since he won’t give to me, I’ll give to myself and make him pay.”

  By overspending, she is trying to counter her unresolved feeling of being a victim of others who are self-absorbed and don’t recognize and acknowledge her. Her buying is an attempt to recognize herself and make her feel whole (not empty inside). She did devote time and energy to her father’s needs and interests, just as she does now with her husband (going along with his interests in books, movies, restaurants, and hobbies). But she resents much of it, and her negative feelings can be expressed along these lines: “See how much I put out for others. And they still don’t notice me or respond. Therefore, I deserve to get all I want when I want it. Since they’re insensitive to me, I’ll be insensitive to them.”

  The more Melinda spends, the more she invites her husband to treat her coldly and to resent her insensitivity to his wishes. Now Melinda feels even more neglected by him as he reacts with resentment toward her. Typically, self-sabotage intensifies the negative emotions we hate the most.

  Part Four. Melinda begins to acquire new insight into how she is attached emotionally to feelings of being refused, deprived, neglected, and not valued. She realizes that, unwittingly, she embraces these negative emotions. All the while she has been using blame, passive-aggressive reactions, and other protests and defenses to cover up her entanglement in these negative emotions.

  She sees this more clearly after doing the following exercise:

  What do you feel you are missing out on in your life? Do you feel gypped or cheated in any way? Do you frequently find yourself mired in these feelings?

  Where in your life do you expect not to get your needs met (for instance, in your relationships or career)? List your expectations with respect to loss and deprivation.

  Make an inventory of recurring disappointments in all areas of your life. How have you not valued yourself? Is this not evidence of an emotional attachment to this feeling?

  List the parental messages you received about fun, success, pleasure, or about getting rewards or benefits for yourself.

  List your parents’ patterns of withholding affection and emotional support from themselves. How did they deny themselves? Compare with your own patterns of emotional self-denial.

  Melinda now understands her self-sabotage. It is embodied in symptoms such as her anger, apathy, depression, irritability, boredom, gloom, and out-of-control spending. She is aware these symptoms spring out of her emotional attachments to feeling deprived, neglected, and unworthy. (Frequently, such attachments, when they remain unconscious, become more intense, disruptive, and painful as we get older.) She sees that Larry’s shortcomings mirror that part of her that is insensitive and neglectful to her own feelings and needs. In reacting to him, she has been deepening her feeling of being unworthy. She also realizes that, at least in part, she chose Larry as a partner because he was a good candidate with whom she could act out what was unresolved in her psyche.

  Instead of challenging him directly about her feelings, she has been reacting passive-aggressively, in a way that thwarts him as she thwarts herself, while sabotaging their relationship. As she works on her feelings toward herself, she sees her situation differently. She is no longer triggered by Larry and ceases to “act out” with him. Because of this shift in her, Larry also changes for the better. He ceases to react passive-aggressively to her, and he no longer gives to her the negative feelings she had unconsciously been looking for.

  As her understanding deepens, she observes that she slips less frequently into old patterns. She is now moving forward out of those bumpy ruts, on to smoother terrain where her life takes on new satisfaction and pleasure. In the months and years to come, as she sees more fully her part in reactivating negative emotions from her childhood and recycling them in herself, her compulsive shopping ceases completely, along with her dissatisfaction and feelings of neglect, and she establishes a new relationship with herself that’s full of respect and appreciation.

  Melinda’s self-sabotage is just one version of the deadly game most of us play to some degree, in some fashion or other. Does her example help you to see how negative attachments and feelings keep you locked in old, self-defeating patterns? In the unconscious, we’re willing to endure and exacerbate the very thing we say we hate the most. We’re determined to experience and to maintain in our lives feelings of neglect, deprival, abandonment, shame, rejection, and unworthiness, even as we are aware how much that hurts us.
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  Categories of Emotional Attachments

  Freeing ourselves from negative emotional attachments, and thus from self-sabotage, hinges on our ability to recognize three categories of emotions—deprivation, control, and rejection. Our entanglements in these emotions have their origins in early childhood.

  The first category of negative emotions is experienced in the oral stage, the first eighteen months of life. This is when we first develop emotional attachments to the following aspects of deprivation: Feeling refused, expecting loss, feeling starved and going without, feeling deprived of what you really want, missing out, never having enough, never feeling satisfied, drained, feeling ignored, neglected, held up, denied, and disappointed.

  These negative feelings create a sense of emptiness at the core of our being. We may feel lonely or discontented, or have a strong sense of deficiency or loss. We feel trapped in these feelings and don’t see a way out.

  To compensate for the dissatisfaction or emptiness, we try to substitute with something that feels like getting (food, sex, love, drugs, recognition, and money). We can be desperate and compulsive in our pursuit of some such form of getting. As babies, our first sense of receiving was oral (getting food or other satisfaction through the mouth). Thus it feels to us as adults that getting something from the world around us is the easiest way to resolve our inner emptiness. Overindulgence often follows, which only makes matters worse because, once the initial satisfaction of getting wears off, the inner emptiness is intensified rather than alleviated. Overindulgence doesn’t work for us because, no matter how much we do get, our emotional attachment to deprivation and refusal takes precedence. The negative feeling becomes our expectation and we unconsciously look for it.

  Emotional attachments often produce cravings for some behavior or substance. Cravings can serve as a psychological defense when they create the illusion that an individual really wants to get satisfaction (by having the cravings satisfied), rather than to feel deprived. In this unconscious defense, the individual is saying, “I’m not looking to feel deprived or refused. Look how much I want to have this! My desire for it proves how much I really want it!” This defense can be quite effective. The intensity of the craving convinces us that we really do want that which, in fact, we are attached to not having. Thus, the craving hides from our awareness our secret willingness to experience, in the oral stage, deprivation and refusal. Trying to satisfy the craving can become highly self-defeating, as when a compulsive gambler acts out his emotional attachment to the feeling of losing by, sure enough, losing all his money. His craving to gamble convinced him, though, that he wanted to win.

  Our earliest sense of deprivation was oral—when mother’s milk didn’t always arrive on time for instant gratification, we hollered and cried in protest. We began to experience that the world outside wasn’t providing us enough of what we wanted or needed. As adults, we are burdened with symptoms of this underlying emotional attachment that can include feelings of being dissatisfied, selfish, depressed, greedy, impatient, entitled, and so on. With such feelings, we act out with hundreds of variations of self-sabotage.

  In essence, we are emotionally invested in the painful feeling that something is missing or is being withheld from us. This negative feeling is familiar from our past. Trying to take care of it with food, drink, sex, shopping, or money is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Cravings by their nature remain unfulfilled. As mentioned, cravings serve as a defense: they convince us we want to get, to cover up our attachment to the feeling of not getting. The more we remain dissatisfied, plagued by the feelings of emptiness that emotional attachments produce, the more likely we are to lose control of our behaviors and emotions in the futile quest to compensate or cope. The chances increase that we will become addictive, compulsive, obsessive, or phobic.

  To take another example, Susan feels left out by her friends who are apparently too busy to go out with her on Saturday night. She settles into the feeling that her whole life consists of watching others have fun while she sits home by herself. She sinks into this feeling as if it were quicksand. Feeling sorry for herself, she binges on cake and wine. Why? Her overindulgence in food and drink feels like a remedy for the anguish of feeling abandoned and unloved. But take away the emotional factor—her indulgence in these feelings of missing out—and she would have no anguish and hence no compulsion to binge on substances.

  Think for a moment how difficult it is to feel gratitude for what we have, or how challenging it is to feel good about ourselves. Think of how pervasive are the feelings of being let down by life, disappointed in ourselves, in others, in our jobs and relationships. Doesn’t this chronic condition indicate the likelihood that some part of us is invested emotionally in the expectation and feeling of being deprived, refused, and drained?

  For many people, there is never enough money, food, recognition, sex, or power. Behind their cravings lurk the secret hunger for an empty breast, unrelenting poverty, eternal emptiness, and a feeling of emotional starvation. “Not true,” we may say in defensive protest, “I’m not secretly aligned with feeling deprived and empty. Look how much I want to get! Look how eager I am to get in any way I can! My crime is really wanting too much!” We prefer to plead guilty to being greedy or selfish than to recognize the emotional attachment at the core of our problem.

  Some psychologists say that we only need to cultivate a feeling of gratitude to overcome impressions of being deprived or refused. However, I contend that feelings of gratitude cannot be permanent and genuine unless we first come to terms with the starving beggar who lurks in our psyche, wanting only to feed on the feeling of what he or she is not getting. That beggar easily overrides our attempts to feel gratitude. We need to become responsible for that part in us, and we must understand the myriad ways that part starves us of happiness, pleasure, and love.

  The second category of primary emotions to which we are unconsciously attached and which instigate self-sabotage comprises variations on feeling controlled. These include feeling under the influence of something or someone, taken advantage of, used, beaten down, ripped off, conned, violated, persecuted, intimidated, trapped, forced to submit, pushed around, dominated, restricted, restrained, held up, made to endure inappropriate behavior, imposed upon, obligated, made to look bad, forced to pick up the burden or do it all oneself, required to see things their way, told what to do, overwhelmed, and helpless.

  Many of us unconsciously set ourselves up to be controlled and dominated. As children, we spent years feeling controlled and under the influence of our parents. Consequently, many of us continue to have an unconscious affinity for feeling powerless and helpless in our lives. As adults, we are primed to recreate circumstances in which we again find ourselves being controlled, manipulated, and dominated—by bosses, spouses, friends, our children, the situations of our lives, the government, and our own impulses, desires, and addictions.

  When unable to self-regulate in some situation, we can feel taken over by something bigger than ourselves. In our passivity, we allow ourselves to be under the influence of something that dominates us. There’s an unconscious willingness to remain in submission to this force, despite the suffering it causes. A frequent factor in alcoholism and drug addiction is this secret willingness, through inner passivity, to come under the influence of substances that can feel more powerful than our will to resist.

  Often self-sabotage consists of our passive-aggressive reaction to feeling controlled. A young boy feels controlled by his mother. He feels he is told how to think, feel, behave, and even what to wear. He is desperate for some sense of power to counter the terrible feelings of passivity and helplessness. He becomes anorexic and accomplishes this feeling of power by actively refusing to eat. Now it is his mother who is helpless to influence him. His anorexia is emotionally based. Though his resistance is unconscious, he has found a passive-aggressive way to rebel against the control of his mother, though at the great cost to him of self-sabotage.

  In another
example, a mother wants her daughter to lose weight. The mother makes derogatory comments about her daughter’s figure and tells her what foods to eat and not to eat. The daughter rebels by putting on more weight. She does the opposite of what her mother wants in order to resist submitting to her mother’s demands. Yet, regrettably, she now is unable to moderate her own self-defeating rebellion.

  At times, all of us display passive behaviors (again, this is a remnant of the many childhood years we spent in various degrees of helplessness). Here are several more prominent passive behaviors and feelings that are forms of self-sabotage:

  -- Going along with the agenda of others, agreeing with their perspectives, accepting their negative behaviors;

  -- Sacrificing on an on-going basis your wants and needs;

  -- Putting other people’s feelings and needs before your own;

  -- Rarely speaking up or expressing your feelings; letting people walk over you;

  -- Feeling compelled to take blame and to explain or defend your behaviors or reactions;

  -- Being suggestible; believing what others say; allowing others to make your decisions;

  -- Enduring unhealthy or painful situations and not taking action to change your difficult circumstances;

  -- Being in a state of perpetual confusion about what you want;

  -- Procrastinating and being forgetful.

  Many of us avoid confronting our emotional issues in order to avoid feeling that we are submitting to the person (such as a parent, spouse, or boss) who is requesting or demanding reform from us. It feels as if we are being controlled when we allow someone else to help us or guide us. We may also feel that we will lose ourselves in the process, just as we felt as children when our parents towered over us with their expectations and demands.